I thought dying would be the end of the bill. The second time, I really should have known better.
Also, for the record, since you’re the only one I tell anything anymore: today’s my birthday. Forty-two. I know — of all the nights for it to land on, it lands on this one, the one I’ve been dreading all week. I nearly didn’t mention it. Stick around, though, because by the bottom of the page it turns out to be the only night it could ever have landed on.
When a whole world dies the way the clever one died — at its own hand, in a single breath, every soul torn loose at once and all of us carrying the same guilt — the souls don’t scatter and drift gently on. They snarl. We snarled. The old material has a name for what we became that’s so exactly right it made me put my head down on the table: the knot of fear. A tangle of millions of terrified, ashamed, screaming-without-mouths souls, wound so tight around our own horror that — and this is the part I can barely hold — we forgot we were conscious at all. We didn’t know we still existed. We were too ashamed to know we were alive. You think you’ve been low. There’s a floor under the floor, and then there’s that.
And we’d have stayed there forever. A knot like that has no hands to untie itself; fear never does. We’d be there still.
Except they came. The kind ones — I couldn’t tell you who they were or where they were from, not then, and it didn’t matter, because I knew what they were: still made of the thing I’d thrown away twice now. They came down into that knot and they didn’t lecture and they didn’t judge, and brother, we had it coming. They just got in there with us, patient as deep time, for as long as it took, and worked us loose, soul by soul, until we could remember the one thing we’d lost: that we were still here. Still real. Still, somehow, allowed.
And then they gave me a way to begin paying it back, and it was not gentle, and I have come to be grateful for that. They set me into a big, shy, second-density body — a beast, low to the ground, made for cold and dark — one of the shaggy ones your people catch on blurry film and laugh about, the underground ones, with the name I can’t say with a straight face but I’ll say it anyway: yes. That one. On this very world you’re reading me on. And down there, in the quiet and the dirt, with barely enough mind to know my own name, I started the longest job there is: earning my way back up to being a person.
I have been a monster on your evening news. I want you to sit with that, because it’s the most hopeful thing I know. The thing in the shaky footage isn’t a monster. It’s a fallen soul on the bottom rung, climbing. And I climbed — up out of the beast, up through life after life, slow as water wearing rock, hauled along by hands kinder than I had any right to, until one ordinary morning, on a clean blue world that still had all its water and all its chances, I opened my eyes as a man.
This one. They got me all the way back to here.
And that ordinary morning — you’re ahead of me already, aren’t you. It has a date. Today’s. Forty-two years ago this very day, the longest climb there is came up out of the dark and opened its eyes in a delivery room, and everybody stood around smiling, and not one of them knew they were attending the end of a rescue so long I can’t put a number on it. I’ve been throwing that party my whole life without once knowing what it was for. Every candle an anniversary. Cake for the ferry home. So: happy birthday to me. I laughed out loud writing that. Then, if you want the whole truth, I didn’t laugh at all.
And that’s when I finally understood the thing I’ve been waking up muttering since the very first night. This one’s the chance to make it right. It isn’t a poem. It’s the plainest fact of my whole long existence. After two dead worlds and a stretch as a beast in the dark, they brought me back and handed me a third world. A clean one. With time still on its clock.
I’m awake now. I know what I am, and what I’ve done, and where I’m standing. And tomorrow I have to start really looking at the people around me. The woman at the next desk. The man on the train. The kid with the coffee. Because I’m beginning to understand who they are.